o read the passage, where Mansie, simple soul
that he was, was described as going into the byre in the morning to
learn if the cow had calved during the night, and finding, on opening
the door, the donkey of a traveling tinker, he turned and ran into the
house, crying: "Mither! Mither! The coo has calved, an' it's a cuddy!"

Whenever he reached this part of the story, his mother would go off into
a fit of uncontrollable laughter which left her helpless and crumpled up
in a heap upon the nearest chair. Her laugh was very infectious; it
began with a low, mirthful ripple, well down in the throat, and rose in
rapid leaps of musical joy till it had traveled a whole octave of
bubbling happy sounds, when it culminated in a peal of double forte
shakes and trills, that made it a joy to hear, and finally it died out
in an "Oh, dear me! What a callan Mansie was!"

As Robert approached manhood, he took more and more to the moors,
wandering alone among the haunts of the whaup and other moor birds,
wrestling with problems to which older heads never gave a thought,
trying to understand life and to build from his heart and experience
something that would be satisfying. Silent, thoughtful, "strange" to the
neighbors, a problem to everyone, but a bigger one to himself, life
staggered him and appalled his soul.

Earnestly he worked and tested his thought against the thought of
others, sturdily refusing everything which did not ring true and meet
his standard. Old religious conceptions, the orthodoxy of his kith and
kin, were fast tested in the crucible of his mind and flung aside as
worthless. The idea of Hell and the old Morrisonian notion of the
Hereafter appeared crude and barbarous. His father's fate and the
condition of the family left to welter in poverty, the cruelty of life
as it presented itself to the great mass of the working class, could not
be reconciled with the Church's teaching of an all-loving and omniscient
Father.

With the audacity of youth, he felt that he could easily have
constructed a better universe. He felt that Hell could have no terrors
for people condemned to such hardship and suffering as he saw around
him. Life was colorless for them; stinted of pleasure and beauty, with
merely the joys of the "gill-stoup" on a Saturday night at the local
"store" to look forward to, there was in it no real satisfaction either
for the body or the mind. Would he, indeed, have to wait till after
death before knowing anythin